No, it's more like saying "I judge an artist on my terms regardless of how well they sell on the market".

> artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on

The main output of programmer's work is their understanding of the system they work with, the rest comes from that. Behind the code there's its author's intention, vision, their tastes, philosophy and experience that makes them tackle problems in specific ways. Code review is, aside of quality assurance, mostly about communication between people, convincing them to your ways of doing things (or getting convinced by others) and communicating needs. It's what keeps projects running and what makes people improve their skills.

You don't need to see magnificence in code to realize that there's more to it than just the syntax tree to compile.